environmental and not hereditary; and the very fact that there is such a startling sameness in American exteriors argues that there is a corresponding diversity in the unconscious. We wear the same feathers but underneath we are immigrants from many lands.
This explains why our novelists never rise beyond a depiction of manners to a revealing of character. To begin with, only a few of the men mentioned could be subjected to deep treatment. Most of them are stiff fronts, behind which vacancy takes the place of the passions, tumults, Weltanschauung, and mystic grandeur which belong to the unconscious. Imagine Woodrow Wilson or Billy Sunday or T. R. as the hero of a great novel! How quickly each would become wooden and unconvincing! The trouble is that they are too typically American; the trouble is that a people united only by conscious bonds, have, for the sake of unity, denied their unconscious and alien character; and behind the striking samenesses gapes a void.
What then of such genuine and deep men as Lincoln and Gene Debs? At first glance we seem to have found what we are seeking. But alas, at second glance we see that their very depth differentiates them from the American people, and that when they are taken over into art they are like foreign particles, austerely and terribly separated from their social environment. Our nationalism screamed in the late war: where did it hold "malice toward none, and mercy for all," to say nothing of democracy? Where was "a race of Lincolns"?
Is the case then hopeless? Possibly yes for any art that requires typic characters; and curiously not so for semi-lyrical poetry. Mark Twain came the nearest to writing a national novel in Huckleberry Finn; and this for the excellent reason that taking a boy as his hero, he could approximate the psychic development of the nation. But we cannot have great national art so long as boys are the measure of our value.
In poetry, however, the case is different. Poetry is an excellent medium for giving environmental colour, snap-shots, ideals and abstract tendencies; it can give the vague flavour of a mixed society; and best of all it can reveal, not through a symbol, but directly, the unconscious of the poet. Now this unconscious is something passed on to the poet through a long descent; it is the common racial inheritance, and differs only according to the stock
